Familiar Demon

by Amy Lane

  Edward nodded and looked down at his hands again. “Paul never told me the price he must have paid. To live with us and grow old and never see me age… I don’t understand this world, Mullins, where people give so much and get so little.”

  Mullins wiped his eyes on his shoulder again, surprised because his shoulder was wet. “Do you think he didn’t get something for his currency?” he asked, smiling slightly. “He got you, Edward. He got family. He got kindness. A lover who looked at him as though he was a young man, even when he’d seen nearly seventy winters. Do you think that’s nothing?”

  A sobbing breath. And then another. Suddenly, Edward seized Mullins’s hoof—

  And laced their fingers together.

  Mullins let out a startled beast’s sound, and Edward stared desperately into his eyes.

  “They’re blue,” he said. “Like a lake on a summer day. I can see them… and the outline of your jaw. You were quite a handsome man, Mullins.”

  Mullins shook his head, unwilling to talk about the semi-transformation Edward was witnessing, because it surely couldn’t last. Instead, he tightened his grip on Edward’s hand and raised their hands to his beastly mouth, then placed a gentle benediction on the knuckles.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Edward,” he said quietly. “Tell me what you need—”

  Edward scrambled across the wooden floor of the cabin, pressed Mullins to the floor, and sobbed on his chest with the full force of his grief.

  “Oh.”

  Mullins wrapped his arms around his boy’s shoulders and held on tightly, stroking Edward’s hair and feeling the rough satin of the bright orange strands under his fingertips.

  “Just hold me,” Edward begged between sobs. “Please.”

  “As long as you need,” Mullins promised hoarsely. He would tell Menoch later that he’d been compelled—and it was the truth, but not the way Menoch would hear it.

  There truly was not a force on heaven or earth that would have moved Mullins from that moment, holding Edward and offering the crippled solace he could.

  “DO YOU remember Paul?” Edward asked, breaking into Mullins’s thoughts with uncanny accuracy.

  “And Dorothy,” Mullins conceded. Edward’s other long-term love had died at twenty-five, a scant year after they’d gotten together. “We grieved for them both.”

  Edward finally met his eyes. “You held me, both times,” he said. “You convinced me that there was a tomorrow without them. You sat on this floor and held my hand, when it should have been impossible, and I saw your face, your true face, when it shouldn’t even be a memory, and you walked me through my grief. Do you remember?”

  Mullins was shaking with those memories, with the sweet weight of Edward’s head on his shoulder, with the heat of their bodies pressed together, with the feeling of Edward’s hair under his fingertips. “Of course I do.”

  “That grief I felt, it was real.”

  “I know it.”

  “It was human grief—I have a familiar cave in my breast carved out for that very emotion.”

  Well, he must have. He was fearless that way, allowing himself lovers, allowing himself to care.

  “You’re so very brave,” Mullins whispered.

  “If you were to go, never to return, the pain… it wouldn’t fit in that cave,” Edward told him, voice past shaking and on to breaking. “It would blow my chest outward, destroy my body, eclipse the sun. I need you in my life. I want you in my bed—but that’s secondary. I need you in my life. Tell me—tell me truly—that you want to go back to your jagged cave in hell and perpetrate atrocities on the unwary.”

  Mullins closed his eyes. “I loathe it,” he burst out, unable to lie about this—not to Edward.

  “Tell me you don’t love me.”

  He made a sound then—a whimper, the tenor of a beast from the throat of a man. “No,” he whispered.

  Edward stepped into his space and grabbed his hands, his battered human artist’s hands, which only Edward could see, only Edward could touch, and laced their fingers together.

  “It’s time,” he said boldly. “It’s time to be brave. My heart needs you now, beloved. There’s no room in here for another human lover to take your place while you gather your courage.”

  Mullins closed his eyes, and to his wonder, Edward cupped his cheek—the soft skin of it, not the beastly jaw. He rubbed his thumb over Mullins’s lips, his soft human lips, and Mullins forgot himself and licked the pad of it.

  Edward leaned into his chest then, and wrapped his arms around Mullins’s waist, resting his head on his shoulder.

  “If you fail,” Mullins felt compelled to warn him, “your soul is at risk too.”

  “I’m not going to hell,” Edward said with a confidence Mullins envied. “Hell is without you. If we fuck this up, I’ll be wherever you end up. Please tell me you’ll try, beloved. Please tell me you’ll try.”

  Oh God. Even as Mullins thought about the deity he wrapped his arms around Edward’s shoulders and, counter to all the mandates of hell, began to pray.

  “For you,” he promised. “Only for you.”

  FIVE YEARS ago, in Las Vegas, Harry let himself get caught so Edward and Francis could get rescued captives to safety—and Edward couldn’t find him. Oh, they knew why now. Suriel had interposed himself, voluntarily, for Harry’s safety, and other magics were at work too—old and fierce ones, hostile to all the boys, but Harry in particular. But at the time, all Edward and Francis knew was that they couldn’t find their brother, couldn’t sense him anywhere on the planet, and their misery and panic could be felt through seven dimensions, straight to the twelfth sphincter of hell.

  Summon me, Edward. Come on, boy, summon me. I can’t help you unless you call!

  Mullins remembered thinking the words, fiercely hoping, praying in his way to the one force of nature he could remember believing in. Edward hadn’t let him down yet. When he felt the call he practically popped a hole in the roof of hell—and the fabric of space/time itself—appearing before Edward and Francis as they huddled on the floor of their rescue van, twined about each other like furry ivy.

  “Boys!” he barked. “Human forms! How am I to convince the lords of hell you had any sway over me when you weigh nine pounds apiece!”

  “Francis weighs five,” Edward snapped, his orange hair standing up over his head. “And what in the hell are you doing here?”

  Mullins stared at him blankly. “I…. You summoned me?” Because obviously that wasn’t the case. There was no chalk on the ground, no circle, no safeguards. As Mullins gaped at Francis, huddled in a circle of fur still, he felt the faint buzz of belated safeguards, erected for courtesy and not for true protection.

  “I should have summoned you,” Edward said, eyebrows knitted to a foul temper, “but no. I just curled up in a ball and mewled like a kitten. Thank you for showing up.”

  Which was exactly what he’d done, wasn’t it? He’d shown up. Out of thin air. Without any call but the terror beating in Edward’s feral heart.

  “For you,” he said, the realization shaking him more than those rare moments when they meshed fingers, when Edward’s capable hands cupped his jaw, felt the contours of a face not visible to man for over 300 years. “Only for you.”

  Now, in the present, 140 years after Edward’s rebirth as a feral cat, a noble physician, and a fearless warrior, Mullins swallowed his terror, much as he’d made the boys swallow theirs before they ventured out in the desert to find Harry.

  “Only for you,” he repeated. “What is it you need me to do?”

  Edward smiled at him, a plan alight in his eyes. “You know the spell you gave me, when I asked you about this years ago.”

  Mullins felt his face burn. “I never should have done that. You said you wanted to know how Emma had brought Leonard back.”

  Edward tilted his head. “I asked you about fifteen years after Dorothy passed on. Did you really think I wasn’t planning this then?”

  “I think you’ve be
en unfathomable to me for nearly a hundred and forty years now, Edward,” Mullins said with dignity. “I don’t know how you can even look upon my face.”

  “Because you’re a truly beautiful man,” Edward shot back, a faint smile playing with his lips. “And I enjoy seeing your emotions glow in your eyes.”

  Eyes that Mullins closed. “Not so loud,” he begged hoarsely. “If anyone in hell hears you, I’ll be bound to my chamber, never allowed to be summoned again.”

  “Is that what happened to Leonard?” Edward asked sharply, turning to rummage through a pack on his bed. “Because he was in pretty bad shape when Emma got him, and I remember that you had to haul him around.”

  “Indeed.” Mullins shifted on his back legs. “By the time Emma was ready to summon him from hell, Menoch could see his fading bestiality. I committed a transgression, and Menoch used the excuse to bind him to two rocks and flogged him while Emma tried to pull him into her world. I appeared in his stead and told her I’d get him out, and you boys saw the rest.”

  Edward nodded, brain obviously busy. “That gives me an idea,” he said, chewing his bottom lip. “But only if things get really bad first, yes?”

  “No! You are not to boomerang to hell to bail me out!”

  Edward pinned him with a hard glance. “My brothers are in on this,” he said. “Suriel is helping them because he can’t stand to be separated from Harry. You need to understand that this is not going away. How long have we been doing rescues, do you remember?”

  “One hundred and eighteen years,” Mullins said dully. And three months, two weeks, four days, and six hours. He’d lived every moment in fear for the lives of his boys—Edward in particular.

  “Do you remember why the first one worked?”

  Mullins racked his brains. “Because Harry stole the neighbor’s horses on the way to town. You hadn’t been planning on it, but he remembered you needed to get the girls out some way.”

  “And how did the horses get back?” Edward prompted.

  Mullins found himself smiling. “Francis memorized a spell to put back lost items while you were getting notes to the girls. Because….” He scowled. “Because you asked me to teach it to him.”

  “Exactly. Harry has his way for planning for contingencies, and I have mine. Between the two of us, we manage to cover almost everything. So believe me when I say I’ve got some Plan Bs, Plan Cs, and Plan Ds up my sleeve, and Harry has ones without letters—Plan Purple or something. That’s Harry’s specialty.”

  “Plan Purple Harry,” Mullins said, smiling in spite of the seriousness of the situation. “Understood. I’ll trust you.”

  Edward turned to him, eyes bright and shiny. “Really? You swear?”

  That took Mullins back a moment. “That what? I trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  His boy—his man—who had grown so much in his time here on earth.

  “With all I am,” Mullins said softly. Even if Edward let him down, if this wild plan failed somehow, Mullins could do no less. The thought of his bare and jagged cell in the twelfth sphincter made him queasy. He would rather be unmade than think he would really return there for all of eternity, particularly when Edward promised him heaven.

  Kindness.

  Love.

  Edward smiled, his ruddy cheeks popping into apples, his green eyes alight with wickedness and cheer. “Excellent. Hours ago I was pretty despondent, you know—but if you trust me, I think we can make this work.”

  EDWARD FOUND the paper he’d scrawled Mullins’s spell on from memory, and then pulled out a legal tablet from one of the drawers in the little cabin.

  “Come here,” he called, settling himself down on one of the kitchen chairs. “I know the floor is usually our place, but it’s far more comfortable here, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Mullins smiled shyly, remembering how he’d gone from the floor to the furniture in the Youngblood home, and the boys had been so respectful of every step. “But no tea.”

  Edward regarded him soberly. “I remember every safeguard,” he promised. “We’re too close now to take that risk.”

  They settled themselves down at the little wooden table, and unbidden, Mullins had a vision: Harry and Suriel eating dinner here, lit candles on the table, Harry’s wry, self-deprecating smile making Suriel’s eyes light up with kindness.

  “This is where they honeymooned,” Mullins said thoughtfully. He closed his eyes and let himself watch them, just to see their affection.

  “Why, Mullins, you voyeur,” Edward chided, and Mullins felt his face heat.

  “I wasn’t watching those parts,” he said chastely. But he couldn’t help it. He grinned, with no idea what the expression looked like on his beastly face. “But they are both very beautiful.”

  Edward rolled his eyes. “Harry assures me he’s very plain, but I’ll take that the way you meant it.”

  “And how did I mean it?” Mullins asked, confused.

  “That someone you loved was beautifully in love, of course.”

  Mullins scowled and allowed Edward to pick up the pen and the legal paper. In hell, he would have made a show of holding a pencil between the cleft in his hoof, but it was tedious and tiresome, and much easier to write with the stylus in his mind. But here, in order to do trial and error work, a tablet was a much better idea.

  “You assume demons can love,” he said, not sure if he wanted to debate this. It was a rule in hell—an absolute. Demons had forsaken their souls—had given up all finer emotions associated with said soul. Love was one of those. For years, Mullins had been holding on to a half-remembered morality, a sort of list of things humans absolutely could not do and still retain their souls. He’d made them public knowledge to his superiors as things he absolutely would not do. Finally it became more time-efficient for Menoch, Renotly, and the rest to just not ask him to do those things than to punish him until someone else was assigned to the job.

  But he’d been schooled and schooled well as to what he was and what he was not.

  Whatever it was he felt for Edward, whatever affection moved him to protect the Youngblood family, it was not, strictly speaking, love.

  Edward snorted. “You most certainly can.”

  Oh no. “But… Edward. It’s part of the covenant we sign. We sign away our soul—our ability to—”

  Another inelegant snort. “And I call bullshit.”

  “Excuse me?” He really was affronted. The last 400 years of his life had been predicated upon the fact that his morality was a construct and he was clinging to it with the skin of his hooves.

  “What do you think love is, Mullins?”

  Mullins stopped and stared at him, even as Edward opened a “knapsack porthole” in space and started pulling out various tomes to set on the table.

  “It’s the glorious ascendant emotion that occurs when two people would clear any hurdle, endure any sacrifice, destroy any interloper, in order to touch each other. It’s the perfect blend of the angelic aspects of kindness and serenity and the demonic aspects of fierceness and carnality, tempered with the mortal earthiness of mundane, day to day interaction! It’s—”

  “It’s what happens when two people want to be together. Always.” Edward shook his head. “And that was a lovely bit of poetry you were spouting there, but have you given a thought to what it means?”

  Mullins let out a shaky breath. “I hadn’t dared to think—”

  “Two marriages,” Edward said, as though he were barely holding on to his patience. “I’ve lost a husband and a wife, and I can tell you what sex is when it’s glorious and what sex is when it’s a simple need to connect with this person you care for. I can tell you that it does, indeed, make you your more angelic self—that part is true, but not in any perfect or serene way. It just makes you want to be… better. And I was a mess after Dorothy—you remember that?”

  Mullins looked away. “You certainly drank a lot.”

  “I did. And I spent a great deal of time naked with consenting strangers,
do you remember that too?”

  If Mullins’s ears hadn’t been pointed like a boar’s and covered in coarse fur, they would have been pink. “It was not my job to—”

  “My brothers summoned you to drag me out of an orgy,” Edward said dryly. “They did it on purpose, by the way. They knew I’d be so embarrassed by having you see me like that, I’d perhaps temper my behavior—and it worked.”

  Oh, Mullins remembered. He’d lurked far too long in the corner of that room, watching Edward—his Edward—holding on to a chain suspended from the ceiling, biceps bulging, fair skin flushed, as a masked Adonis of a man fucked him from behind and lovely, laughing blonde temptress took his cock into her mouth.

  For a moment he’d been paralyzed, overcome with lust, wanting more than anything to join in the abandon that surrounded him, just to, for a moment, have his body touched, in spite of the demonic deformities that would make such a joining a horror for his partner.

  Then he’d seen the expression on Edward’s face—and the world had stopped.

  There’d been pleasure, yes—desperate pleasure—and Edward’s naked body had been all that was humanly beautiful. Muscles straining, cock erect and prime, his asshole yielding in lovely submission, Edward was what human abandonment to lust was supposed to look like.

  Was it Mullins, only, who had seen the grief as well?

  Mullins waited until the climax—everybody’s climax, including the young lady’s—had been attended to, before scooping Edward into his arms from his panting, sweaty collapse on the sordid floor. At first Edward had protested, feebly, but as Mullins pulled him to a bathroom and threw him into the shower there, he had come to his senses.

  And wept.

  And then he’d found his clothes and dressed, and soberly accompanied Mullins outside to where his brothers waited, ready to move to the next job.

  Nobody had said a word about that night, or where Edward had spent a week of his life, or those moments of Mullins holding him close, rocking him like a child and murmuring nonsense into his hair.